INFORMATION NOW: quality

Showing posts with label quality. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Blending Quality Learning to Survive the MOOC Invasion!

“Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities will be in bankruptcy, including the state schools (in US)”

- Clayton Christensen

Kodak? Walkman (Sony)? Are we ready for the changes required to survive the disruptive and global learning innovations invading the world of education today?

Looking forward to my talk and participating in the 2nd Blended Learning Symposium on 28 November 2013 at UCSI University, Kuala Lumpur. Al-Hamdulilla, life is getting back to normal, and looking forward to Insya-Allah a productive period in the coming months exploring new ideas to spark the learning brain back to life. However, first lets...

TALK

This talk, focuses first on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how they will play a critical role in triggering Higher Education institutions around the world to accelerate the urgency to innovate their learning and teaching models. The second half of the talk will focus on how we can transform the students’ learning experiences using a blended approach infusing Flipped Classroom, Brain-Designed learning, Gamification, more authentic assessment methods, etc.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

1 Super Brain Yoga session, 2 online activities, 2 short videos and 92 slides in 60 minutes (including 15 minutes for Q&A). Mission impossible? Not really, because my mission is not to finish, but trigger participants to rethink how they learn and teach in a disruptive, uncertain and learning overloaded world. Mission accomplished...Insya-Allah :)

ONLINE ACTIVITIES

CHALLENGE 1

Go to this PADLET URL: http://padlet.com/wall/ucsi13.
DOUBLE CLICK/TAP anywhere on the wall.
Add your NAME.
WRITE anything (Question, Idea, Comment, etc.).
Add a PICTURE of you, or the event (Optional).
CONGRATULATIONS!!!

CHALLENGE 2

Go to the SOCRATIVE Student Login site: http://m.socrative.com/student/
Enter the room number: 331107
Choose your favorite (team) COLOR.
Wait for me to start the SPACE RACE.
Did Your Team WIN?
Did you get all CORRECT?

SLIDES

Blending Quality Learning to Survive the MOOC Invasion from Zaid Alsagoff

Happy and grateful to be back, Al-Hamdulilla :)

The 5 Best Ways to Build Quality Backlinks for Your Website or Blog

No one can deny the fact that backlinks are vital for the success of your online business – they will play a big role in determining your search engine rankings. However, the thing you need to understand is that after the latest Google updates, the quality of backlinks is more important than the quantity of those links. It means, not only do you need some diversity in your link pool, but you also need to ensure that those links come from high PR, authoritative websites.

Also Read: Tips on How to Have Better SEO Results with Link Building
Also Read: Best Way to Easily Find and Remove Broken Links from your Website or Blog

Many people often make a mistake when judging the quality of backlinks. Unfortunately, they are not like diamonds that you can rate considering clarity, cut, color, and other features. Backlinks are different, and they cannot be graded using any simple scale. Still, when you get a backlink from a website, the search engines will rate them as okay, good, mildly good, or excellent.

As it is not easy to have one single definition of quality backlinks, you have to find another way to make your link building campaign work effectively. A better idea would be to ensure that you dont go for bad backlinks. A backlink that is not bad will be considered good for your link building campaign, and here are a few ways to avoid bad links and fetch good links.

How to Build Quality Backlinks for Your Website or Blog

Take Full Advantage of Guest Posting

Writing guest posts on other blogs is a good way of getting quality links. You need to ensure that you pick a blog that is relevant to your theme. It is worth mentioning that the links from these blogs are considered good because you will have your post approved by a human webmaster, which is something that makes Google think that you know the topic well, and might have an informative site too.

Remember, your guest posts will work if they hold some value for the blog owner, and, at the same time, are relevant to your website/blog. Therefore, you should try to tailor the content of your post to fulfill this requirement, and its not that difficult too. For instance, if your blog is about leather care and maintenance, you can easily write and publish that post on a blog that sells leather jackets and shoes.

Also Read: How to Find the Websites or Blogs that are Copying your Content?

Use Credible Article Marketing Websites

Even though the value of article marketing is no longer the same as it was a few years ago – thanks to Google Panda and Penguin updates – you can still find a few legitimate sites to publish your articles. You can use these sites to post your article and have a link placed in the article that points back to your blog. Quite like guest posting, you can again write articles on topics that have some connection with your blog. Just make sure you pick a right category on these article-marketing sites to submit your article.

Using these sites is a lot easier than getting your article published on another blog, and thats one of the reasons why guest posting holds more value as compared to simple article marketing. Still, you can use these sites to diversify your link pool. You can find a category according to the theme of your blog and post as many articles as you can – though its a good idea to stick with one-article-a-week policy.

Add Your Links to Comments Sections

For this, you can pick blogs, article sites, and websites where they have a comment section. You simply need to make a productive comment and embed your link to your key phrase. This works quite well, but the only consideration is that youre going to get the link juice only if you opt for a comment section that comes with "do-follow" tag. It may take some time to find it, but you will accomplish the task after conducting some research.

Also Read: The Top 10 Websites to create free Logo for your Blog

Get Links from Directories

This is still a good way of getting backlink, but the catch is to find a legitimate and well-followed directory – this could well be a paid directory. Although you can try some free directories like Google locations, you will be better off making use of paid directories like Yelp.

Make Use of Forum Postings

Making posts in forums, with your link attached to your keyword, is still effective. However, you dont always need to make posts; you can simply convince the forum administrator to place a link to your blog – it is difficult, but not impossible.

About Author:
Kate Funk is a writer and tutor at tutorleader.com. She loves covering writing tips and strategies for blogging.

Image source: http://www.psdgraphics.com/file/seamless-chrome-chain.jpg

INFORMATION NOW

Pages